


i've just seen a ghost (the memories i hate the most)

by latent_sunday



Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Self-Hatred, Sleepy Bois Inc as Family, Trans Fundy (Dream SMP), kind of? i used irl!techno's version of sbi canon so he's not related to them, no beta we die like ghostbur, the (dream smp) is meant to denote theyre the characters not the ccs! :]
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:28:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/latent_sunday/pseuds/latent_sunday
Summary: The truth is that Ghostbur tried, once upon a time, to find the hero and the villain.Or: During his brother's exile, Ghostbur reflects on stories, his family, and what little he remembers of the past.
Relationships: Ghostbur (Dream SMP) & Fundy (Dream SMP), Ghostbur (Dream SMP) & Philza (Dream SMP), Ghostbur (Dream SMP) & Tommyinnit (Dream SMP), Ghostbur (Dream SMP) & Tubbo (Dream SMP)
Kudos: 8





	i've just seen a ghost (the memories i hate the most)

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully this was communicated from the Dream SMP in parenthesis after the character tags but this fic is about the characters and not the actual ccs :] I've gotten into DSMP recently and I think that the contrast between Ghostbur and Alivebur is fascinating. I couldn't resist writing a quick character study! It was really fun exploring these characters, I might post some character studies of the rest of DSMP!sbi at some point.
> 
> The title is from "A letter to my younger self" by Ambar Lucid.

There’s a lot of Wilbur’s life that Ghostbur can’t remember.

The later portion of it is sparse, hot flashes and cold spots. Contrary to what his siblings seem to think, the time before he met Phil and Techno is just as fragmented. Most of the memories he can pinpoint are hazy things, mirages swatched in watercolor, candy-blue and daisy-gold. If he squints hard, focuses just enough, sometimes he can see Wilbur cradling a book—one with stained, curling pages and a cover emblazoned with the name of his birth mother. 

Ghostbur doesn’t know what happened to it, but he _does_ remember Phil bringing him to the market with pockets full of emeralds and a promise to replace it on his lips. If he holds his breath, Ghostbur can almost feel the ghost of warm leather under his fingertips; he can almost see see the golden ink swooping down the book’s spine. _Folktales of the Outerlands,_ the ink boasted, and he remembers that as soon as Phil placed the book in Wilbur’s waiting hands, Wilbur tugged him into the tightest hug he could manage.

Ghostbur doesn’t know what happened to _Folktales of the Outerlands._ He doubts he ever will. Still, the memory of holding it lingered like burnt sugar beneath his tongue when he started to gather books for his library. Despite all his searching, he still doesn’t have a thick book with a blood-red cover. He has a couple smaller collections of folktales and myths, though, and they teem with the tales he can remember reading as a boy. Sometimes he’ll pour over them when the city lanterns bloom red, setting metal and wood ablaze beneath the setting sun. It’s comforting. Simple, because books are eons easier than memories—Ghostbur might not be able to recall much of his time alive, but he knows that he can recite _The Legend of the End_ backwards and forwards. 

It’s easy because stories don’t change. Their pages don’t disappear beneath the haze that claims the rest of his life, and they don’t decide on a whim that they hate him. Stories have never left him floundering with nothing but the memories that bleed from his mind, vibrant blue splotches dissolving into shadows on the concrete.

There’s a lot of Wilbur’s life that Ghostbur can’t remember, but he knows that his son used to love him.

Fundy had always been consumed by the trials and triumphs of ever-turbulent youth, yes, but ultimately, he was a boy who loved his father. He was confident, too, from the time he spent an afternoon attempting to toddle across a room to the day he tugged on Wilbur’s waistcoat with a fire in his eyes and the declaration that he wasn’t really a girl proud on his tongue. In response, Wilbur kissed Fundy’s head and said that no matter what, he would always love his son. Fundy said “I love you too”, back then, but when Ghostbur tried to say "I love you" earlier today, Fundy's eyes gleamed with disgust, amber-gold contorted by a hatred that Ghostbur tries in vain to understand. He does his best to tear down his son’s walls, only to be forced to watch fresh concrete dry on Fundy’s palms and hear sharp insults explode from his mouth.

He talked to Tommy about it today, saying perhaps this newfound bitterness was just because Fundy was stressed about coming back from his honeymoon. Ghostbur never had a honeymoon, but he imagined that there must be stress after it, right? 

Tommy just looked at him oddly and asked how much of the wedding he actually remembered. 

The day of his son’s wedding is little more than a blur. Ghostbur remembers the joy at seeing his little boy all dressed up and grinning like that, but the day is tinged with something darker, because he remembers a church and a bridge, a smile and a laugh, but little else. 

Tommy said that in the end, Dream left Ghostbur’s son sobbing on cracked stone steps. Ghostbur was told that after it all, Wilbur’s _enemy_ rushed to comfort Wilbur’s _son._ He was told that Eret hugged Fundy close, reassurances tumbling from their lips and Ghostbur rushed over to try to comfort him, too. Tommy hesitated, then, and Ghostbur asked him to continue, eager, because he was sure that he would have figured out how to comfort his own son. He regrets asking, now, because Tommy told him that when Ghostbur tried to place some blue into Fundy’s hands, Fundy snapped that no matter how much Ghostbur pretends, life is not one of the fairytales he collects.

The memory’s already blurring at the edges, ink contorted into senseless shapes, warbling circles and wrinkled paper as Ghostbur’s chest pangs. 

There’s a lot of Wilbur’s life that Ghostbur can’t remember, but there are things he knows. He knows that in a fairy tale, there is a hero and there is a villain. The hero is brave, loyal, fighting for a just cause, and the villain is cruel, fighting only for their own ends. In fairy tales, there is a king and his queen. There is a prince tangled in the grip of destiny—a hero in love with a beautiful princess. There is a devoted sidekick and a sadistic villain.

In reality, there was never a king; there was a spirit forged in war who was not ready to be a father. There was a young warrior crowned with sinew and bones in the wreckage of a burning village, blood splattered across bruised palms. There was a thief clothed in a threadbare cloak of shadow, armed with honeyed words and his dead mother’s knife. There was a starving child darting through war-torn streets with a demon on his tail. There was a toddler with horns creeping through the soggy-paper skin of his forehead. Later, there was a woman Ghostbur can barely recall, one with red hair and scales patching up her forearms. There was a baby curled up in his arms, so small and soft, look at his little claws, look at them—

The truth is that Ghostbur tried, once upon a time, to find the hero and the villain. At first, it was easy. His brothers were the heroes—impulsive, but ultimately kind-hearted and clever, fighting for their country and the love they clutched close to their chests. Eret, at first, was the villain, though Ghostbur didn’t quite understand why. He knew that Wilbur hated her, and that was enough for him. It was enough for him until he saw the way that his son’s face lit up whenever the king ruffled his hair or spoke about how proud they were of him, and it was then, he thinks, that it all started to fade to gray.

Thinking about it now makes his head pound and his stomach scream. It was easier, then, because he thought that maybe, once upon a time, Wilbur had been a hero, too. Wilbur wasn’t a prince, but he was a soldier voyaging far from home, campaigning for freedom and in love with a girl. He was a nurturing father, an understanding brother, a righteous general. For a time, he refused to fully consider that despite the good he did, perhaps he did truly awful things, too.

It’s hard to think he _ever_ was a hero, though, when he hears about his own son shoving him away with a snarl or when he sees the way all of the people he once called friends dance around him. It was the realization that Wilbur probably hadn’t been a hero, Ghostbur thinks, that made it possible for him to even consider the reality that his brothers might not be the heroes either.

See, Tommy looks at Ghostbur, clammy skin and the grayed-out sea, and Ghostbur thinks of the boy with the heart of the Blood God. Tommy looks at Ghostbur, and Ghostbur thinks of the voices clamoring for blood in his not-brother’s head, thinks of the way Techno yelled while Wilbur laughed about something Ghostbur can’t remember, thinks of the way Techno reluctantly hugged him goodbye when Wilbur caught him sneaking out of the house for the last time—

The memories of his not-brother fades into bloody ink, after that, into the phantom ache of a sword plunging into his abdomen and the feeling of their father sobbing into his hair, but he remembers his youngest brothers more clearly. When he closes his eyes, he can still sometimes see their armor stark against the dawn sky. Their hair whipped around their faces, eyes sunrise-bright with grins aching of youth as they cackled at something Wilbur said. 

He can see now that Techno’s personality warped before he left, compassion bleeding into cruelty, light-hearted belligerence to true bloodlust, and he fears that his brothers are changing, too. Perhaps not quite so dramatically, but they’re changing nonetheless.

Ghostbur’s pretty sure that Tommy always reminded him the most of himself. In spite of that, ( _or maybe because of it,_ the evil voice in the back of his mind hisses, acrid as smoke choking out the reeds along a river) he looks at Ghostbur like he’s a skeleton with a bow pulled back, rotting flesh peeling from broken ribs, a mere breath away from reducing Tommy to nothing but a cooling, crumpled body on the dead grass. Since his vacation started, Ghostbur’s started noticing that Tommy’s breathing gets all funny if Ghostbur moves towards him too quickly. He doesn’t know if that ever happened before, but he excuses it by thinking that maybe Tommy doesn’t like it when people sneak up on him anymore.

That’s not the only way he’s different, though. See, Ghostbur knows that Tommy has always tossed pebbles into the lake just to laugh when they skip, ripples splashing his boots, but he now he tosses in rocks and screams until his voice goes hoarse. He never cries anymore, since he says it makes him weak. Instead, he shakes with rage beneath the off-white fabric of his tent. Now, when he laughs, it’s a bitter thing, splintered into something desperate and cruel. Once upon a time, Tommy bandaged up his cuts, but now he picks at the scabs to make them bleed. 

The changes aren’t limited to Tommy. Ghostbur knows that once upon a time, Tubbo’s most prized possession was the heart of gold harbored between broken ribs. He treasured the righteousness in his chest, fostered it whenever he could. Back before Tubbo’s ribs healed up wrong, leaving nothing but the barest hint of gold beneath the bone, Ghostbur has a clear memory of Tubbo finding a bird with broken wings outside camp and using crumbs from his own rations to feed it each day. 

If Tubbo found an injured bird now, Ghostbur worries he might just leave the thing to die. The boy that once hollered out into the forest for fun is consumed by a specter bound in the folds of a neatly-pressed suit, his freckled nose buried in a bundle of paperwork and sun-bleached-blond curls trimmed short. 

Where Tommy looks at Ghostbur with something that meanders too close to fear for comfort, Tubbo looks at Ghostbur with something twisted in his gaze. Something between pity and apprehension, Ghostbur thinks, though he faintly remembers Phil saying it was nothing but calculating. Ghostbur isn’t sure what Tubbo calculates, and somewhere deep in the back of his mind, he has a feeling that even if he did find out, he’d just forget, the memory running through his fingers, grains of sands through fingers stained blue.

His brothers are not the same anymore, and Ghostbur is not a fool. He can tell from their pinched faces, from their way their blue fills up before they even get the chance to fully grasp it, that his brothers are in pain. So he tries. He tries to keep them happy, he tries to be a good person because he owes it to them, doesn’t he? He owes it to them because heroes and villains don’t exist, but he’s starting to suspect when he was alive, he may have been as good as a villain by the end.

So Ghostbur reads the folktales in the sewers, sure, but he forces himself to thumb through his past, too, pages torn out and waterlogged as clotted ink stains the tips of his fingers blue with blood. He learns, and he hates the version of himself that leers from the shadows. When his eyes close he wonders if that’s the version of himself that he’s always been fated to become, alive or dead. 

He feels Wilbur at the edges of his mind, sometimes, in the cruel impulses he swallows down, in the sharp retorts that burst from his throat, in the way a strange sort of satisfaction he gets watching Tubbo and his cabinet get into arguments. To say that he hates the sensation would not nearly be true enough. He yearns to help, to make his family happy again, but he’s being picked apart from the inside out, loose seams down the arm of a sweater as the occupant tugs at a thread. The headaches come and go, vision buckling as it all goes gray. He gives when he can, smiles when he must, but he feels reality slipping between his fingers. His blue is useless. His words fall on deaf ears. 

It doesn’t help that sometimes, Ghostbur will hear Phil talking about resurrection. It only drives everything home further; Ghostbur is useless, when it comes to everything going on with his family now. The worry lingers, constantly, without enough time to forget, that Ghostbur’s family wants Wilbur back, _needs_ Wilbur back. So how is Ghostbur supposed to explain how much fears he fears the man who shares his face? After all, in a sense, Ghostbur _is_ Wilbur—at least, Ghostbur is the shell of the man who once was. And he doesn’t fear himself, does he? 

At the same time, though, maybe it really would be for the best if Wilbur returned. It seems like his family _listened_ to Wilbur. Even if they didn’t, Wilbur harbors the memories Ghostbur cannot. He would enough know how to help, Ghostbur’s sure. Wilbur would know how to help because he essentially raised these boys, didn’t he? He fell in love, he won a war, he won an election, he saved his people. 

At the same time, if the battered snippets of conversation and the pieces of paper stuffed in cabinets and desks can be believed, Wilbur might’ve razed a country. He might’ve been consumed with hatred, he might have cheated, he might have been the reason his loved ones could barely look Ghostbur in the eye, at first. Wilbur definitely won the war, but there is no question that he lost the battles in his own head. Wilbur would know how to help, but would he care enough to? If Ghostbur let Phil resurrect him, would he be sacrificing the existence he clings to so desperately only to hurt the ones he loves more? 

There’s no clear answer, but Ghostbur fears that the children who Wilbur raised to play war now strike to kill.


End file.
